No, Ubisoft's EULA clause ordering you to destroy your games isn't new, nor is it unique
No, Ubisoft's EULA clause ordering you to destroy your games isn't new, nor is it unique
And they wonder why people pirate games.
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I am mad about how dumb we all are, and how easiy swayed by simple narratives that reinforce our biases.
From the Baldur's Gate 3 EULA:
This Pact shall remain in effect for as long as you use, operate or run the Game.
You may terminate the Pact at any time and for any reason by notifying Larian Studios that you intend to terminate the agreement. Upon termination all licenses granted to you in this Pact shall immediately terminate and you must immediately and permanently remove the Game from your device and destroy all copies of the Game in your possession.
This didn't cause any stir when it came out. That makes sense, right? Nobody reads these things.
Except everybody in the press read this one, because it went viral for being written in character as a D&D document and having a bunch of jokes in it.
Admittedly this is meant to apply to refunds and things like refusing the privacy agreement, but that's the point, it's fairly standard boilerplate for that reason.
Just because people don't read the agreements and didn't know about it doesn't mean they should have put it. Destroy physical copies is a dump clause and isn't enforcible.
Of course that doesn't stop companies from trying to enforce unenforceable clauses example: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/16/politics/arbitration-signing-away-rights-disney-plus-wrongful-death-lawsuit
For sure. There's plenty of unenforceable stuff in EULAs. For one thing a bunch of these are trying to apply globally across places with way different laws managing customer protections.
But if you don't mind that logic getting turned both ways, just because a EULA clause isn't enforceable doesn't mean you shouldn't add it.
If the idea is your lawyers think there's a risk of people buying a copy, refunding it and keeping it and you want to make sure that doesn't happen it makes some sense to add the clause. If a judge ever says that clause doesn't apply to a given situation you still mitigated the risk from the intended applicable situation.
That's why these license deals also tend to have boilerplate about how a clause being unenforceable or made illegal should not impact the rest of the clauses. It's a maximalist text, by design. It mostly exists like a big wet umbrella to keep companies out of the splash zone. Whatever ends up being used in practice is anybody's guess. The world of civil law and private deals is way less of a black and white exact science than most people getting their legal intuition from crime dramas tend to think.
In the case they should have made it clearer in the terms, there are many companies that try to enforce them even if they seem unenforceable like Disney in the death case.
There is no excuse to put terms like this, Disney proved that even if they look unenforceable they might try to enforce them.
Yes, that's the point. You put them in there, try to enforce them, see if that plays out or not. Ultimately you're punting the determination of how far they can apply to the courts.
Which ends up being why a lot of these never get enforced. In some cases the companies would rather let you quietly break their terms than roll the dice and find out that they don't have the protections they tried to give themselves.
Ultimately the limits of EULAs are set in legislation. What really matters is consumer protections. And in issues like these and copyright more generally we are in a bit of a no man's land where the regulations are woefully out of date, not keeping pace with the new online-driven economy of digital goods and companies are mostly not trying to enforce a bunch of their EULAs anyway.
We end up in a system where a significant chunk of our online economy is decided by Google and social media companies by default.